nigel w wrote:Notice you're in Tunbridge Wells, Richard. Never listed my location on here but we're near neighbours. We're in the tiny village of Hever : one castle, one church, one pub , about a dozen old farm houses and other than that fields of sheep and endless orchards. God's own country, I call it...

Doing our best to live up to that survey about who-lives-where-listens-to-what (was it Uncut?) it seems there are quite a few of us from, in and around T Wells. I wonder if it was one of you who took the Rachid Taha and Terry Hall & Mushtaq CDs into the charity shop on the High Street last year....

Hever? Nice castle. Great cycling country - plenty of decent pubs to motivate you. 'The Rock' in Chiddingstone Hoath....ahhh, what I wouldn't give for a pint of Larkins Porter.....

seems there are quite a few of us from, in and around T Wells. I wonder if it was one of you who took the Rachid Taha and Terry Hall & Mushtaq CDs into the charity shop on the High Street last year....

No way - not records I would ever dream of parting with !

Taiyo also wrote:

Hever? Nice castle. Great cycling country - plenty of decent pubs to motivate you. 'The Rock' in Chiddingstone Hoath....ahhh, what I wouldn't give for a pint of Larkins Porter.....

Funnily enough I was in The Rock with my two sons on Saturday evening and we asked for three pints of Larkins Porter, only to be told by the young girl behind the bar: "We only do it in the winter". I said to her: "Have you been outside today?" Later that night, it snowed...

seems there are quite a few of us from, in and around T Wells. I wonder if it was one of you who took the Rachid Taha and Terry Hall & Mushtaq CDs into the charity shop on the High Street last year....

Not guilty, either. I'm the other side of the 'Wells, on the outskirts of Pembury, looking out over Paddock Wood and East Peckham. If the wind is in the right direction I may hear some of that Neil Young concert at the Hop Farm in the summer!

And no disrespect to Larkins, but I'll opt for a couple of well-kept pints of Shep!

After a tedious M1 crawl today bringing the Imelda Marcos Memorial Shoe & Handbag collection back from University for the hols, my daughter provided the answer by stuffing a CD in the car player: The Coasters! And then in the kind of philosophical discussion you only get in a traffic jam around Luton, we reasoned that there's a long line of wonderfully played music that also, b.t.w. has an intelligent sense of humour - which includes those Coasters, the 3 Mustaphas 3, Ian Dury, the mighty Cake. THAT'S the stuff.

And also b.t.w. was there ever a greater one note guitar solo than I'm A Hog For You? Pure genius . . .

Ian A. wrote:After a tedious M1 crawl today bringing the Imelda Marcos Memorial Shoe & Handbag collection back from University for the hols, my daughter provided the answer by stuffing a CD in the car player: The Coasters! And then in the kind of philosophical discussion you only get in a traffic jam around Luton, we reasoned that there's a long line of wonderfully played music that also, b.t.w. has an intelligent sense of humour - which includes those Coasters, the 3 Mustaphas 3, Ian Dury, the mighty Cake. THAT'S the stuff.

Ah yes! I'd add Chuck Berry and Micky Jupp to that list, and it's not an accident that those two are mentioned in the same sentence.

That's not just any old castle. That's the castle in which Henry VIII wooed Anne Boleyn. Something of a pivotal wooing, so to speak, in English history! It appears to have a particularly magnificent four-poster bed among its attractions.

Ah, whatever happened to that lovely chap - any recent sightings? He used to book us Hot Vultures for his club in Southend, famous for the local taxi messages that used to waft out of the PA, and then later on dragged the entire cast of a '70s Stiff tour across to see us in some university folk club as we were playing in the same building on the same night. Quite alarming to look up mid song and see that lot troupe in!

You know, it isn't necessarily cheerful music that cheers me up. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that I burst out laughing when I listen to some Fado, or split my sides at Skip James, but I find something distinctly uplifting about a lot of supposedly 'sad' music. There's a whole wad of blues, mainly urban blues, that I find exhilirating. T.Bone Walker (particularly that Atlantic album he cut in the mid 1960s), Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and - best of all - John Lee Hooker's VeeJay stuff.